The present invention was primarily devised as a means for automatically stacking a predetermined number of pie shells in nested relation for subsequent packaging. Heretofore, pie shells were manually stacked in predetermined numbers per stack as they were delivered to the stacking operation by suitable conveyor means and then transferred to a packaging operation and storage. This was a relatively slow and costly operation because of the need for manual labor and it was with the object of materially increasing the speed and reducing the cost of packaging predetermined numbers of pie shells that the present invention was devised.
Also, because the pie shells were delivered to the stacking operation in a more-or-less randomly spaced order, a further object of the invention was to devise an automatic stacker, readily adjustable for any particular count of items per stack, that would be particularly independent of the order in which the items to be stacked were delivered to the stacker mechanism and to design the stacker mechanism so that it would be capable of high speed operation and therefore adaptable to accommodate the items to be stacked wholely independently of the rate at which such items might be delivered to the stacking mechanism.